Marriage Mellows Men, Study Shows

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Marriage is called "settling down" for a reason: A new study
finds that men with a wedding ring are likely to engage in fewer
aggressive or illegal behaviors than single men, both because
nicer men are more likely to get married and because marriage
settles men down.

Researchers aren't sure how
matrimony affects women's antisocial tendencies, because
these behaviors are less common in women in the first place, said
study researcher S. Alexandra Burt, a behavioral geneticist and
psychologist at Michigan State University.

In contrast, marriage has long been known to mellow men out. One
study of 475 high-risk adolescent boys followed through adulthood
found that marriage reduced criminal behavior by 35 percent. But
researchers couldn't tell whether mellow men are more likely to
get married in the first place or whether matrimony itself
has a calming effect.

To find out, Burt and her colleagues studied 289 pairs of male
twins, both identical and fraternal. At ages 17, 20, 24 and 29,
each man reported his marital status and filled out
questionnaires about his
aggressive behaviors and illegal activities.

All of the men started out unmarried, and more than 97 percent
remained that way at age 20. By age 24, 22.9 percent were
married, and by age 29 that number jumped to 58.8 percent, the
researchers found.

Men who were married by age 29 were less likely to have committed
antisocial acts in their younger years, Burt said, suggesting
that nice guys do get the girl.

"That's very consistent with a selection effect," she said. "In
other words, men who eventually got married were less likely to
be engaged in antisocial behaviors to begin with."

More wedding rings, fewer handcuffs

But even the more aggressive men who got married became less
antisocial after the ceremony, the researchers found. That's
where the twin-study design became useful, Burt said. Comparing
an unmarried man with his married identical twin takes genetics
out of the equation and makes it more likely that you're
uncovering environmental effects.

"You have this beautiful, built-in, natural control, because
you've controlled for any genetic influence on antisocial
behavior," Burt explained.

Sure enough, the analysis of the twin pairs revealed that once
men marry, they settle down. Overall, the researchers found,
marriage seemed to reduce antisocial behavior by 30 percent.

"That's nothing to blow your nose at," Burt said.

Burt is now investigating other environmental influences on
antisocial behavior, from parenting to peer groups to the
neighborhoods where kids grow up. More work is needed to
understand how marriage exerts its soothing influence, she said,
but other research has examined factors like less time spent with
bad influences (aka "friends") and better social bonds driven by
matrimony. Burt added that it's still an "open question" whether
cohabitation
mimics the marriage effect.

"As with many things in science, it's more complicated than we
originally thought," she said. However, she said, "not that many
things are related to desistance from antisocial behavior… The
fact that something can reduce it is exciting."